Darwin's Children

by Greg Bear

  “A GPS NuTest report out of Pittsburgh and neighbor complaints led us to a particular house. I got needed medical attention to a particular virus child at a school in Indiana. His parents are very happy. The doctors say he's going to live, Mark.” Browning sounded ebullient, relating this tale of detection and shakedown.

  “With so much power, I know you could help us here,” Augustine said.

  “Honestly. I can't. Did you hear that France offered to send in wide-spectrum antivirals, and President Ellington refused?”

  “I did not.”

  “All the precious beltway schools are well-supplied. Nobody raided their medical stores. And remember, Ohio did not go for Ellington, last election.”

  Augustine pinched the bridge of his nose. He had had a headache for the last two hours, and it showed no signs of going away. “I hear no charity, Rachel. Why the call?”

  “Because the shit that passes for opinion around here is starting to scare even me. I can't get through to the NRO or NSA bosses. Secretary of Health and Human Services is unavailable. I think they're all in conference in their secure little rabbit holes in Annapolis and Arlington. Mark, you know as well as I do that everyone in the House and Senate had their kids well before SHEVA. Only two senators and four representatives have SHEVA grandkids. Tough luck. Statistically it should be more. Sixty-four percent of our aging electorate favored shoot-on-sight policies against fugitive virus kids in a CNN-Gallup Poll yesterday evening. Two out of three, Mark.”

  “How secure is this line, Rachel?” Augustine asked.

  Browning made a sharp raspberry between her teeth. “Can you guess what's coming down from the beltway?”

  The headache pounded. He leaned over the desk. “All too easily.”

  “Queen's X, Mark?”

  “Who's Queen today?”

  “That would be me. I'll authorize a special pickup for Kaye Lang and her daughter. People I know and trust.”

  Augustine thought this over for a few seconds. He had never been angrier in his life, or weaker. “I'm obliged, Rachel.”

  He could hear the triumph in her voice. “I'm not as stupid as you think I am, Mark. Alive, she's a pain in the ass. Dead, she's a martyr.”

  “Do what you can, Rachel.”

  “I always do. No timetables, though. I'll do this on my own schedule and tell you as little as possible.”

  “All right.”

  “If this works, you owe me, Mark. Now, here's what—”

  Abruptly, the phone died. He shook it and punched the on button several times. The phone flashed to life, but, receiving no signal, turned off again to conserve power.

  Very likely, SRO had taken over the wireless networks and shut down cell towers around all the schools. First stage of PDD 298.

  Augustine put the phone down just as DeWitt returned to the room.

  “Dr. Dicken wants to see you,” she said. “They've found something.”

  “Supplies?” Augustine asked hopefully.

  DeWitt shook her head.

  42

  PENNSYLVANIA

  On the state route, the traffic was light, three or four cars in the last fifteen minutes. Nobody wanted to be caught driving. Simply being out on the road would be suspicious. George had said the turnoff to the cabin was tricky, hard to see. He had nailed a red plastic strip to a large pine tree to mark the spot.

  Mitch drove more slowly, looking for the red plastic strip and a wooden plaque that joy-riding vandals tended to splinter with ball bats.

  Suddenly, the interior of the Jeep filled with shadow. He felt immersed in inky night. The sensation passed, but it scared him; he could almost smell the darkness, like crankcase oil.

  “Too damned tired,” he told himself, and wondered whether they had heard him in the backseat. He could feel both of them back there, both alive, both quiet. Stella's breathing had lost some of its harshness, but Mitch knew her fever was high.

  Maybe he was coming down with it, too. That would be more than Kaye could stand, he suspected. So, I will not become sick.

  Whistling in the dark. In the oily dark.

  43

  OHIO

  “Jurie left the number codes in a desk drawer,” Middleton said as Augustine and DeWitt followed her into the concrete cube of the research building. “Dr. Dicken told me to bring you all here.”

  Dicken came through the opposite door, carrying a thick folder of papers. He glared at Augustine. “You rotten son of a bitch,” he said.

  Augustine took this without blinking. “You've found something,” he said.

  “You're goddamned right I've found something. How much did Americol pump into the schools? The camps?”

  “To my knowledge, nothing.”

  “You're going to blame it all on Trask, right?”

  Augustine shook his head cautiously. He looked around the big room and focused on the wall of steel refrigerators. “I don't even know what it is.”

  “What would Marge Cross want with all these children?” Dicken held out the folder. Augustine reached forward, leaning on his cane, and Dicken pulled it back, then dropped it on a desk next to the stainless steel cold storage units. Photographs spilled out: color photographs of autopsy proceedings. Even from a distance, it was obvious the subjects were children, some of them infants.

  Dicken took a step away, as if too disgusted to let Augustine come near him.

  Augustine shifted his eyes from face to face, facial lines deepening. He pushed aside the photos, then lifted the cover page on the folder and leafed through it.

  “I know you too well,” Dicken said. “You wouldn't be stupid enough to just let this happen.”

  “Show me the rest,” Augustine said.

  Middleton punched in the code numbers that unlocked the first stainless steel refrigerator door. Fog fell, revealing ranks of jars. Augustine immediately recognized the contents for what they were. The jars on top were small and contained anonymous meaty lumps in colorless fluid.

  The jars below, on taller shelves, contained whole internal organs.

  Middleton's skin had faded to a sickly shade of olive, and her eyes were almost closed.

  “How many?” Augustine asked.

  “There're the remains of maybe sixty or seventy children here, and more scattered throughout the building,” Dicken said.

  “What do you think . . . what purpose?”

  “I won't even hazard a guess,” Dicken said.

  “We never lost this many children,” Middleton said, “and Dr. Jurie . . . Dr. Pickman . . . left before . . .” She did not finish. She closed the first door and opened the second. Trays of thousands of frozen tissue samples, mounted on slides or stored in solution in smaller bottles, had been stacked to the top of the compartment.

  Augustine surveyed the trays, then stepped forward and motioned for Middleton to open the third door, and the fourth. His cane made rubbery squeaks on the linoleum floor. “You're positive none of these were from the last two days,” he said, grasping at some reasonable explanation for all the jars and tubes and dishes sealed, neatly numbered, and marked with yellow-and-red biohazard labels.

  “It's a tissue library,” Dicken said. “Healthy tissue, pathological specimens, whatever they could get. There's a fully equipped laboratory for analyzing them. Jurie and Pickman autopsied all the children who died at this school, and all the schools in this region. I presume they were bringing the dead here from wherever they could get them,” Dicken said. “A central clearing house for cadavers.”

  “Cross paid for the equipment?” Augustine asked. His demeanor was so quiet, his expression so utterly devastated, that Dicken pushed back his anger.

  “Americol,” he said.

  “Mm hm,” Augustine said. He took the list of codes from Middleton and unlocked and examined the next three doors. Two contained the by now familiar stacked trays of specimens. The last contained five cadavers, wrapped in transparent plastic, suspended by hooks and slings from rails at the top of the compartment.
>
  “My God,” DeWitt said.

  “I should have known,” Augustine murmured. “That's certain. I should have known.”

  Middleton approached the open compartment. “Autopsies would be standard, wouldn't they? Is that what we're looking at, a pathology study being done on behalf of the students, to protect them?”

  “No,” Augustine said abruptly. “No studies were ever passed up to Washington, and I doubt they were even sent to the Ohio Central authority, or I would have heard of it. Before this week began, a total of three hundred and seventy-nine children in custody of the schools have died. Very low mortality, statistically speaking. Many of them are probably here. They were supposed to be returned to their families or buried if left unclaimed.” Augustine closed the door. “I did not authorize this.”

  Dicken stepped forward. “Was there any value to the children in doing this . . . research?”

  “I don't know,” Augustine said. “Possibly. Doubtful, however. Anatomically, the children are so much like us that storage of organs or whole cadavers for research never seemed strictly necessary. Biopsies and specific tissue samples from the dead were all I ever authorized. You would have done the same.”

  Dicken admitted this with a quick nod.

  “This implies some sort of large-scale morbidity study. Whole body assessments, thousands of tissue analyses . . . I need to sit down.”

  DeWitt brought a chair. Augustine slumped into it and leaned forward, shaking his head. “I'm trying to make sense of it,” he said.

  “Try harder,” Dicken urged.

  “I know of no reason other than retrovirus expression,” Augustine said. “Tracking expression of novel HERV in the new children. A statistical sampling of expression in dozens or hundreds of individuals, correlated with known biographies, stress patterns. That would require an unprecedented effort. Monumental.”

  “To what end?”

  “It could be an attempt to understand the whole process. What the ancient viruses are up to. What dangers they might present.”

  “To predict incidence of Shiver?” Dicken asked. “That's being done elsewhere. Why do it here, unauthorized?”

  “Because nowhere else do they have access to so many new children, dead or alive,” Augustine said.

  “This is making me sick,” DeWitt said, and leaned on the small desk, pushing aside the folder.

  Augustine looked up at Dicken. “I'm not the puppet master, Christopher. They broke me in the ranks months ago. I've been trying to keep whatever responsibility was left to me in order to maintain some sense of order.” He waved his arm feebly at the stainless steel doors. “People died, Christopher.”

  “That's what Marian Freedman said, last time I visited Fort Detrick. Some excuse. Anything goes. You're not the bad guy here?” Dicken asked.

  “Were they bad guys, really?” Augustine asked. “Do we know that?”

  “What about the parents?” DeWitt asked.

  “Sentiment must be considered,” Augustine said. “Medical ethics should prevail even in an emergency. But we've never faced this kind of problem before.”

  Dicken took Augustine's arm and lifted him to his feet. “One last bit of evidence,” he said.

  Augustine walked slowly through the benches in the molecular biology lab, taking in the collection of expensive machinery with impassivity, long past the possibility of surprise. Dicken opened the hatch at the back of the lab and switched on the fluorescent lights, revealing a long, narrow room. All hesitated before entering.

  Steel shelves reaching to the ceiling held hundreds of long cardboard boxes. Dicken pulled out one and opened the hinged lid. Within were bones: femurs, tagged and arranged according to size. Another box held phalanges. Bigger boxes on the lower right, none more than four feet in length, held complete skeletons.

  Augustine leaned against the edge of the frame. “There's nothing I can do here,” he said. “Nothing any of us can do.”

  “This isn't all,” Dicken said. “There's an upper floor. It's still locked.”

  “What do you think they keep up there?” DeWitt asked, her face ashen.

  “No excuses, Christopher,” Augustine said. “We should not forget this, but what in hell does anger do for us, now? For the sick children?”

  “Not a goddamned thing,” Dicken admitted. “Let's go.”

  44

  THE POCONOS, PENNSYLVANIA

  Eleven in the morning, the dashboard display said. Mitch looked left on the two-lane asphalt road and saw, about a hundred feet ahead, the red plastic strip hanging on a big old pine. He slowed and rolled down the window.

  The signpost was still standing, though it had been knocked askew. The wooden plaque read:

  MACKENZIE

  George and Iris and Kelly

  Mitch got out, unlocked the pipe, and pushed it back through its iron hoop. He took the plaque down from the signpost and stashed it in the back of the Jeep.

  The cabin was made of whole stripped logs just beginning to gray with exposure. It sat on the shore of a private half-acre lake, alone in the pines. The air was scented by pine needles and dry dirt. Mitch could smell the moisture from the lake, the greenness of shallows filled with reeds. Sunlight slanted down through the trees onto the Jeep, illuminating Kaye in the backseat.

  Mitch walked up onto the porch, his heavy shoes clomping on the wood. He unlocked the door, deactivated the burglar alarm with the six-number code, then returned to the Jeep.

  Kaye was already halfway up the walk from the driveway, carrying Stella.

  “Get a bag of Ringer's and set up an IV,” she said. “A lamp hook, flowerpot hook, anything. I'll spread some blankets.” She carried Stella into the cabin. The air inside was cool and sweetly stuffy.

  Mitch spread a sleeping bag on the floor behind a big leather couch and took down an empty hanging pot, then slung the bag of Ringer's solution, inserted the long, clear plastic tube into the bag, opened the butterfly clamp, let the clear fluid push through the tube and drip from the needle. Kaye lay Stella on the bag, tapped her arm to bring up a vein, poked in the needle, strapped it to the girl's arm with medical tape.

  Stella could barely move.

  “She should be in a hospital,” Kaye said, kneeling beside her daughter.

  Mitch looked down on them both, hands opening and closing helplessly. “In a better world,” he said.

  “There is no goddamned better world,” Kaye said. “Never has been, never will be. There's just ‘suffer the little children.’ ”

  “That's not what that means,” Mitch said.

  “Screw it, then,” Kaye said. “I hope I know what the hell I'm doing.”

  “Her head hurts,” Mitch said.

  “She has aseptic meningitis. I'm going to bring the swelling down with prednisone, treat those mouth sores with famicyclovir.”

  They had found the famicyclovir, medical tape, and other supplies in a small drugstore near the pet hospital. Kaye had also managed to score a box of disposable syringes. Her excuses had worn thin at the last. She had told the pharmacist, perched in his little elevated booth in the back of the store, that she was using the needles for a cloth dyeing project.

  That would not have gone over well in the big city.

  She prepared to give Stella an injection.

  “I'm not even sure about the dose,” she murmured.

  Mitch was half convinced he could walk out the door, drive off, and Kaye would never notice he was gone. He looked at his hands, smooth from lack of digging. How had this happened? He knew, he remembered, but none of it seemed real. Even the shadow of grief—was that what he had felt in the Jeep?—even that seemed unimportant.

  Mitch could feel his soul winking down to nothing.

  The drip of lactated Ringer's slid down the long plastic tube.

  “I'll watch her,” he said.

  “Get some sleep,” Kaye said. She slipped the used syringe needle into its plastic cap for disposal.

  “You first,” he said.
/>   “Get some sleep, damn it,” Kaye said, and her glance up at him was like the slap of a flat, dull knife.

  45

  OHIO

  “It begins,” Augustine said. “I've dreaded this day for years.”

  Standing in the number two tower, surrounded by stacked boxes, dusty old desks, and outdated desktop computers, Augustine and Dicken—and Augustine's ever-vigilant agent—watched the Ohio National Guard troops set up their perimeter and cut off the school's entrance. Their view encompassed the main road, the water tower to the west, a barren gravel field broken by lozenges of bare concrete, a line of scrub oaks beyond that, and a state highway slicing through low grassy hills.

  DeWitt climbed up the last flight of steps and leaned against the wall, out of breath. DeWitt nodded. “Governor's office called . . . the director's line. The governor is jumping ahead . . . of the feds and declaring,” she sucked in her breath with a small whoop, “a stage five public health emergency. We're under complete quarantine. Nobody in or out . . . Not even you, Dr. Augustine.” She nailed him with a glare. “Main gate reports twenty more . . . National Guard trucks . . . moving in. They're surrounding the school.”

  Augustine turned to the Secret Service agent, who tapped his earpiece and made a wry face. “We're in for the duration,” the agent affirmed.

  “What about the supplies?” DeWitt asked.

  “They can drop them off at the entrance and we can send someone to pick them up, no contact,” Dicken said. “But they have to get here first.”

  Augustine seemed less hopeful. “Not difficult to isolate us,” he said dryly. “It's a prison to start with. As for supplies—they'll have to go through state lines, state inspection. The state can intercept them and hold them. The governor will try to protect his votes, act ignorant, and shift our supplies to the big cities, the rich neighborhoods, the most visible and well-funded hospitals with the loudest administrators. Stockpile against a potential plague.”

  “Leave us with nothing? I can't believe they'll be that stupid,” DeWitt said. “They'll have a revolt.”